The chances of dying in an aircraft accident are around one in 11 million, but chances of survival are determined by seat selection. MailOnline reported that an aviation expert suggested those sitting in the center aisle seats had a 44% percent mortality risk compared to those sitting in the central rear seats with a 28% mortality rate.
Professor Doug Drury from Central Queensland University explained that this is because aisle seats lack a buffer on one side, that the passenger will most likely be impacted by crash characteristics.
Air Travel Deemed as Safest Mode of Transportation
Drury shared in his article in The Conversation that air travel is still the safest mode of transportation. Statistically speaking, there were only 287 fatalities out of 70 million flights in 2019.
Moreover, Drury noted that the US US National Safety Council's analysis of census data showed that the odds of dying in a plane crash is about 1 in 205,552, compared with 1 in 102 in a car accident.
It is just that people tend to pay little attention to data when hearing about plane crash incidents, such as the ATR72 crashing in Nepal, which leads to the headlines in many news outlets. But it might also be a good thing for air travel as it makes sure that these tragic incidents do not happen to make the airplane experience safe.
Safest Seats On A Plane
It is important to know the dangerous seats on airplanes to be safe, but doing that would first need to assess which are the safest seats on a plane. It is worth remembering the 1989 United Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa in which 184 of the 269 passengers survived the accident.
Most were sitting behind the first class, near the front of the airplane. A TIME investigation focused on 35 years worth of aircraft accident data found in the middle rear seats of an aircraft and discovered that it has the lowest fatality rate of about 28% compared to sitting in the middle aisle seats.
As Drury wrote in his article, this makes logical sense as well because sitting adjacent to an escape row will always offer the fastest exit in the event of an emergency f there is no fire on that side. However, because plane wings store fuel, the middle escape rows are not the safest row option.
At the same time, being closer to the front means you'll get hit before those in the rear, leaving us with the final exit row. The center seats are safer than window or aisle seats because of the buffer given by having people on each side, as you might assume.
Type of Emergency Dictates Survivability
Despite the seating arrangement, Drury also noted in his article that the type of emergency dictates the survivability of the plane's passengers. For example, running into a mountain decreases chances of survivability like what happened to the 1979 Air New Zealand Flight TE901 that crashed on the slopes of Mt. Erebus in Antarctica, killing 257 crew and passengers.
Furthermore, landing on the ocean nose-first also decreases the chance of survival as the world witnessed with the 2009 Air France Flight 447 that ended up killing 228 crew and passengers.
That is why pilots are trained to minimize potential risks during emergencies. They try their best to avoid hitting mountains and look for an open field to land as normally as possible. For water landing, it requires assessing surface tension and attempting to land between waves.
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